The true meaning of the most famous canvases by great artists

The mysterious world of modern art can seem confusing, because it is not in all works that the author’s idea can be perceived at first glance. However, you will definitely be interested to know what meaning the greatest artists of all time gave to their paintings, why collectors pay hundreds of millions of dollars to obtain the canvases of modern masters, and why the museums where their paintings are exposed attract a lot of tourists from all over the world.

At the awesome.club we tried to decipher the hidden meaning of the most famous paintings in the world and found that not everything is as simple as it seems at first glance.

Briton Damien Hirst is the richest artist in the world. He’s been experimenting with colored circles for 25 years, and that’s his trademark. Through them he conveys the theme of death.

But the fact is that they are not just circles, as it may seem at first glance, but homeopathic pills. The artist is obsessed with the idea of ​​the struggle for health in modern society. Even the names of his works, created with the technique spot painting, were borrowed from the Sigma-Aldrich chemical company catalog.

The names are grouped by different types of drugs. The largest group is pharmaceuticals and the colors of the circles correspond to the letters in the formulas of psychoactive substances.

The painting The Two Fridas is a kind of autobiography of the most famous Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo. At this point, it is worth remembering that many of her works were self-portraits.

According to the most common interpretation, the image reflects an event lived by the artist. In particular, the painful separation from her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. The work was completed in 1939, shortly after their divorce. The two Fridas are represented on the screen, but they are two opposing images. On the right is the one Diego loved and on the left the one he betrayed. The artist did not forget her love for her husband and the close relationship with him, even after the separation, despite feeling very lonely and heartbroken.

This is one of Marc Chagall’s most recognized works. This artist’s paintings are also autobiographical, so at the center of the canvas are not just a man and a woman, but the artist himself and his wife, Bella. He is on earth while she flies in the sky, but they are still together. Despite the distance, the lovers are holding hands, overcoming the law of gravity.

In addition, the artist holds a bird with his other hand, a blue tit. It seems that, in this way, he decided to defy the Russian proverb “Better a blue tit in the hand than a crane in the sky” (“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”), indicating that it is not always necessary to choose between one thing and another.

This painting by Catalan artist Joan Miró is part of a total of 12 works created during the period of social instability in Spain. At first glance, the rooster-shaped monsters’ sinister movements are completely incomprehensible. The only thing that immediately catches the eye are the vivid colors that contrast against the apocalyptic black background: one feels that the painting expresses something extremely disturbing.

In fact, the artist conveyed in this way the horror of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). A pile of shiny gold droppings represents fascist ambitions, a dark orange area is the casualties of war, and red hands are blood.

From the beginning of his career, the artist Paul Gauguin wanted to capture the reasoning about life and death on canvas. In 1897 he began to work on painting Where we came from? Who we are? Where are we going?, and, at the end of December of the same year, he concluded it.

The peculiarity of this picture is that it must be read from right to left, like the ancient sacred scrolls. The painting represents 3 main groups of people. Young women with a sleeping child signify the beginning of life. Another group symbolizes the soul at the highest stage of its development, and the old woman of the final group, who appears to be on the verge of death, is a symbol of doom.

Andy Warhol was a very symbolic American artist in the history of pop art. His works are extremely minimalist, represented by objects in their simplest and most recognizable form. An example of this is your popular photo Campbell’s Soup Cans🇧🇷

In 1949, Warhol obtained a university degree and hastened to seek sources of inspiration to create something unprecedented. The artist experimented a lot until he got free advice from art gallery owner Muriel Latow: “Draw what you see every day, something everyone can recognize, like a can of Campbell’s soup.” Thus began the story of Warhol’s famous work.

the abstract series Birkenau is a work by contemporary artist Gerhard Richter, which seeks to honor the memory of prisoners in concentration camps. He was impressed by photographs taken in 1944 by a member of a Sonderkommando, in which dead bodies were prepared for cremation.

Richter projected the photos onto his canvas and then applied the coat of paint to recreate the exact shape of a mountain of dead bodies and fragments of nature printed in a series about the Birkenau death camp.

Orange, Red and Yellow is a work by the American artist Mark Rothko, painted in 1961. In 2012, at an open auction, it was sold for 86 million dollars.

In general, in Rothko’s abstractions one should not look for any hidden image or meaning. His works must be perceived differently: it is important to focus on the feelings that the color of the image provokes in the viewer. The artist’s goal was to allow people to experience all the emotions embodied in the depths of the tone.

This is one of the most famous paintings by Austrian Gustav Klimt, who won the gold medal at an international exhibition held in Rome in 1911.

This is an excellent example of Klimt’s symbolic works. On one side is a girl in the arms of a young woman and on the other an old woman desperately covering her face. And the more we look at the image, the more we are convinced that it is not three generations of a family, but the same woman at different stages of her life, which makes the character a symbol of the cycle of life and the inevitability of the passage. of time.

At first glance, there is nothing unusual about this picture. But researcher Jared Baxter, who has studied the artist’s work in depth, expressed his opinion that the plot of the “last supper” was captured in this painting.

If you take a closer look at the screen, you’ll notice that in the center is a waiter in a white robe that looks like Christ’s, and around him 12 customers, the same number of apostles. Also, behind the waiter’s back is a window whose lines form a cross.

What came to your mind when you saw these paintings for the first time? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section.